Laptop tools

Massimo B. · Posted: Tue Apr 30, 2024 8:14 am Post subject: Laptop tools

Hi,

my installation was migrated for years and maybe I'm based on obsolete tools. What is today required for mobile laptops in general?

I was always using app-laptop/laptop-mode-tools and it's still working. At least it does set harddrive parameters for spindown and dirty timeouts while today the laptop only has NVMe drives, /etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/intel_pstate.conf is throttling the CPU on battery. So it still sounds useful.
Last update was 1.74 - Sat Jul 18 19:10:40 IST 2020.

On IRC I read that laptop-mode-tools are not the modern way anymore. On Intel platforms sys-power/tlp would be used, and on AMD platforms sys-power/power-profiles-daemon would be used.

I looked around https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Category:Laptops and only found model-specific Wikis, but no common Gentoo-on-laptops Wiki.
Which tools do I need today and for which generation and architecture?

For not dealing with that many modern kernel options and required firmwares I currently just run a distro-kernel sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-bin and a complete sys-kernel/linux-firmware, using 1,1G /lib/firmware/ which is 583M usage by btrfs zstd compression.
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HP ZBook Power 15.6" G8 i7-11800H|HP EliteDesk 800G1 i7-4790|HP Compaq Pro 6300 i7-3770

logrusx · Veteran Joined: 22 Feb 2018 Posts: 1833

What's the specific issue you're trying to solve? And yes, I haven't heard of laptop mode tools since 2010 when it still was a thing and I still had a ThinkPad. When I returned back to Linux in 2018 it was already outdated. Nowadays I personally don't use anything else other than power-profiles-daemon on my AMD laptop and I don't even think it does anything useful.

Best Regards,
Georgi

Massimo B. · Posted: Tue Apr 30, 2024 11:05 am Post subject:

As usual, saving power by throttling CPU, GPU, harddisks, frequencies, dirty cycles, displays, brightness, timeouts etc...
A lot of all that what laptop-mode-tools already do and still doing.
At least there have been updates to the project after your comeback. Beside that, I'm using Linux since 2003, never left and nothing else. All years before have been a waste of time.
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HP ZBook Power 15.6" G8 i7-11800H|HP EliteDesk 800G1 i7-4790|HP Compaq Pro 6300 i7-3770

Goverp · Advocate Joined: 07 Mar 2007 Posts: 2044

I use laptop tools. I last looked a couple of years ago, and it was still as good as anything else. Mostly you want to ensure your kernel and drivers have all the necessary low power modes supported, the right frequency driver (IIUC schedutil is what the kernel guys recommend), and the appropriate thermal drivers for your hardware. IIUC you're using a general-purpose kernel, so you should have those already. There's not much more for the tools to do than select the lower-energy settings when running on batteries, and laptop tools does that. IMHO steer clear of using hdparm or whatever to spin down disks, if you still have any - you can lose data, and spinning up a disk takes quite a bit of power compared with just keeping them spinning, so the saving isn't that large. Better, replace the disk with an SSD and your laptop will appear 10 times faster as well as consuming less power.

If you try the power monitoring tool (the proper one, I forget its name, but it's more detailed than the one built into desktop GUIs), you'll almost certainly find that top consumer is the cpu if running 100% (but usually it's idling), then the screen. All the rest tends to be minor, so once you have the frequency driver working, the next best way to save energy is to turn the screen off!
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Greybeard

logrusx · Veteran Joined: 22 Feb 2018 Posts: 1833

xgivolari · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Jul 2021 Posts: 101

For most intents and purposes, TLP at default settings works very well. With newer laptops, it is important to ensure that S0ix/modern standby is working properly, and that the system is reaching lower runtime power states. You can use S0ixSelftestTool and powertop for that. If you are running GNOME or KDE, power-profiles-daemon integrates very nicely with these. However, it is neither as extensive as, nor compatible with TLP. Both work just fine on Intel and AMD systems. Additionally on intel, it is recommended to install thermald for better thermal/power management.

Massimo B. · Posted: Thu Jun 20, 2024 11:21 am Post subject:

You mean, neither sys-power/tlp nor sys-power/power-profiles-daemon are architecture specific and both should work on Intel and AMD? And power-profile-daemon only integrates well when using KDE or Gnome?
I'm using Xfce, OpenRC (no systemd). So for all that systemd does for powersaving, I don't have that.

So I keep laptop-mode-tools for now, as it does not harm, mostly sets harddisk powersaving, usually not that important when using SSDs.
What else I need, tlp, power-profiles-daemon?

I started with powertop. On some old Ivy Bridge desktop, it doesn't work, eventhough the kernel seems to have that all:

Massimo B. · Posted: Thu Jun 20, 2024 11:27 am Post subject:

Next one, testing tlp. The project sounds good and modern, applying quite the same as powertop --auto-tune would do: